1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control apparatus, a control system, and a computer program that can control plural equipments, such as on-vehicle equipments, and can facilitate the development, test and the like.
2. Description of Related Art
It is known to mount several varieties of electric equipments on a vehicle (on-vehicle equipment) to provide more sophisticated vehicles. The vehicle requires much more numbers of on-vehicle equipments in order to be sophisticated more. Thus, the enlargement and complication may occur of the control apparatus, such as an electric control unit (ECU) controlling the plural on-vehicle equipments, and of the control program executed by the control apparatus. Hence, the development is considered to be hard, to need longer time and to require higher cost for the control apparatus and computer program.
FIG. 8 is a schematic view for explaining processes performed by a conventional computer program controlling an on-vehicle equipment, and shows an example of computer program performing a door lock processing on a vehicle. The vehicle is provided with the on-vehicle equipment controlling the door lock, and the door lock processing is performed when a user handles a switch on the door to lock the door, the user handles a remote controller (so called, keyless entry) to lock the door, a dealer carries out the door lock test with a failure diagnosis apparatus and the like.
For example, the computer program shown in this figure includes: a door lock failure diagnosis judgment program 201 that contributes to judge whether or not it is instructed to perform the door lock test with the failure diagnosis apparatus; a security judgment program 202 that contributes to perform the lock judgment with the security function; the door lock judgment program 203 that contributes to judge whether the switch on the door is handled to lock the door or not; a keyless entry judgment program 204 that contributes to judge whether the remote controller is handled to lock the door or not, and the like. These programs respectively contribute to output door lock requests when the conditions described above are satisfied. The door lock processing is performed when at least one door lock request is output by any program. However, when plural door lock requests are output simultaneously by plural programs, it is required to determine which door lock request is utilized for performing the door lock processing.
Thus, the computer program shown in the figure contributes to pass the door lock operation requests, which have been output by the door lock failure diagnosis judgment program 201, the security judgment program 202, door lock judgment program 203 and the keyless entry judgment program 204, to the priority judgment program 206 in order to judge the priorities of respective operation requests output simultaneously. The priority judgment program 205 contributes to select one operation request having the highest priority among the plural operation requests output simultaneously, and then contributes to pass the selected operation request to the door lock output program 206. The door lock output program 206 then, for example, contributes to control an actuator for locking the door of vehicle in accordance with the passed operation request. Therefore, the door lock processing is performed in accordance with a condition having the highest priority.
A patent document 1 proposes a control system that can add a new application for implementing a new function and further can minimize the effect on an existing application caused by the addition of new application. This control system utilizes a software configuration of service application that mediates between a client application and a server application, which are mounted on an electric control apparatus, and that performs transmission of required information with the electric control apparatus while performing a format conversion, an arbitration and the like. The service application can determine, in the case that operation requests are output from plural applications and compete with each other, which operation request should be preferred.    [Patent document 1] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2008-74124